your daily bicycle log

sorry, ~club~. yah, he said he'd just seen u 5 min before.

500W 60 second effort up 18% avg grade

wowowow

i nearly got sideswiped into a parked car on friday and i'm still not quite sure how i made the gap between the car and the van that had moved over on me into the bike lane!

i looked at heap of greasy ancient d/a bike parts from my stripped road bike (now at blasters getting powdercoat stripped), considered cleaning and assembling parts on vacant cheapo cx frame, and said "fuck that." i would like to ride one of these days, but weather and work mean its commuting only.

new gruppo for road bike on way *rubs hands greedily*

hunt3r did you opt for FORCE?

yup, and despite wise counsel from friends here, i did stay with standard cranks. i usually ride a 39/23 up the 6%-8% longer climbs in my neighborhood (1500-2500 vert), and there arent too many short pitches over 10%. also, i got an 11-26. maybe i can get another 5 years out of that ratio before my dotage makes compacts a much smarter idea.

i'm saving about 350g over the setup i had on the bike, but i'm giving some back by adding 300g of couplers to the frame. that'll put the frame at a relatively massive 3.9 pounds, but whatevs. love that frame's ride.

since garminconnect has fucked up its maps, ive been playing with ridewithgps.com. it's very good for mapping, but i dont think it will work for running or other activities so well.

strava is expensive ($60per annum or $10/mo) but it is a great site imho.

the guy at the auto/machines place who stripped my bike seems sorta clueless. not just about bikes, but um, like metal generally. he seemed to be confused as to whether ti is magnetic. he used poly to blast it, so i expect he didnt hurt anything.

he did say that the welds on my frame look really great though.

yikes, although not unexpected anything beyond steel is pretty esoteric really.

I will also put in a good word for Strava. I am really enjoying using that site.

so i just scotchbrited for like 1.5 hours and shit looks pretty rad. one bad thing out of the blasting is that i didnt realize that the bottle mount rivets are alu. the blasting pretty much did the threads in-- i dont know if they can be retapped, or if i should just drill em out and have new rivets put in. i suspect the latter.

I am in hibernation

I'd go for new lugs, If you tap them out there might not be enough metal to support the clamp force.

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now that i have daylight, the threads go quite deep, and engaged the bolt smoothly and securely. i really think its ok.

excellent scotchbrite technique: take 2.5 feet of 2" wide duct tape, affix piece of scotchbrite 2" x 10" to center, fold sticky tails of tape over themselves. loop over frame tube to be brushed. now use shoeshine buffing technique. you can get all of the major tubes done quickly and evenly this way. use small pad 1/2" x 4" for smaller bits. if you are inside, put down a drop cloth, there is some gray/black ti dust generated.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5129/5206931483_05f31940d0_z.jpg

riding on thanksgiving is amazing. absolutely no one out on the streets.

For reals. It was clear and cloudless here today too. Soooooo perfect.

f u cali

http://i55.tinypic.com/2uqbozr.jpg

did my usual thanksgiving ride-- 35 degrees, not a cloud. 2 hours on lots of singletrack around town, really really great. some kitted out guy buzzed my tire to pass me (i couldn't hear him because i was d-_-b). i then shadowed him up and down and around the loop for a really nice hard 15 minute interval.

Finally got my good bike back! Fixed again & it feels great!

Below zero this morning (celsius style obv) and I often find that saps my energy, which is never great in the mornings anyway. But it's sunny and beautiful and I really didn't mind being on my bike.

Last night I took my broken fixie apart entirely apart from the BB and headset so I can send it to Bob Jackson to be repaired and resprayed. I've never stripped (most of) a bike before, it felt, I don't know, manly.

Saw Bill Walton riding out on the road today! He was just entering Fiesta Island (A place in San Diego's Mission Bay that is a 4 mile totally-flat loop that lots of local riders use for training) while I was exiting. He was riding a freakishly tall Zinn bike and wearing a Flouro-Yellow fred jacket. Pretty rad.

SLP, I undergradded right over that bluff from that pic! memoriessssss....

Against better judgement, on Thanksgiving day i did a 13.4 mile, 4400ft. hill climb atop a snow shrouded mountain.

I thought my fitness was regaining but about an hour into the climb my HR did a strange 30bpm jump (to my max!)... was it the 30F degree temp? the appearance of snow on the sides of the road? the elevation/lack of oxygen? so weird... a steady grade, my pace was a consistently sluggish 9mph. after about 8mins it jumped back down to 155bpm but it scared the fuck out of me.

I found out I had a broken spoke on my rear wheel which, after a 52 minute descent back to the parking lot, I probably should have done something about. /stupid n00b

I've been dormant since the Hill Climb at the start of November: prior to today I'd only been on the bike once in the previous 20 days (and that was only a 16-mile ride). I thought I'd better get a ride in today just to keep myself in the habit, otherwise I might have drifted into the easy option of staying in until Spring.

Winter has arrived early. It was -5C (23F) at Heathrow last night, so probably a bit colder round here, and (according to the Met Office) while I was out this morning the temperature rose from -3C to a roaring -0.8C. My face and eyes were really stinging when I set off, but I managed to get going and forget the discomfort after about 15 minutes.

I was on my way home, an hour into the ride, in Epping Forest, when I realised my back wheel had punctured. I had to ride on the rim until I could find a bit of pavement to park up on and try to fix things. I was there for half an hour, getting colder and colder and colder. I could feel the shard of something poking through the tyre, but couldn't get it out - I needed some tweezers, but had to resort to gouging away with my keys. Then the valve on the spare tube somehow came apart, with the top trapped inside the dust cap. This took forever to sort out with my numb oily fingers. By the time I got going again I was shivering and the icy wind felt like someone was drilling into my bones.

I don't have a Garmin, just a normal Cateye computer, but I've just got myself an iPhone and downloaded this app: http://www.abvio.com/cyclemeter/

It plots my route and records my speed and climbing stats and stuff. I tried it out today, but somehow it turned itself off after ten seconds (which I only discovered when I stopped to fix the puncture), so I've only got data for the last 5-6 miles (ridden at low speed due to repeated traffic lights / icy roads / hypothermia).

I've worked out how to send this data from the phone to gmaps:
http://maps.google.com/?q=http://share.abvio.com/131f/8965/4cf1/9f67/Cyclemeter-Cycle-20101128-0942.kml

I've also managed to send myself a gpx file, which (I'm guessing) will contain the speed graph which I can view on my phone, but I don't have any software to open gpx files. What do I need to download?

pretty cool. still in search of perfect uploading log site.

Trying to decide if it is at all cycle-able out there tonight...

no way is it! remember you broke your elbow you maddie

After today, I think I'm going to give it a miss until the Arctic retreats back up north again. You two are in Scotland, aren't you? At least there's no snow down here yet.

it wasnt very cold today, like 42 deg, but with no sun and the wind, it felt ~icy~. i bailed on my intended route and headed home to watch football after 1.5 hrs.

scene out my window this morning
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cozen/5214977667/

I cycled!

It was fine.

easy 55k yesterday afternoon, trying to work on keeping cadence 80+. weather had been wet and windy earlier in day, but tights and overshoes was probably overdressing a tad in retrospect.

rode w/a friend over to the marin headlands today. beautiful day. in the 50s, low wind. i flagged a kitted out couple down to ask them how much further the road we were on went and after answering, he looked down at my feet, smirked and said "keep those things white, k?" i just whispered to myself, "i got them free w/the bike" :(

fucc da haters jax, i got my shoes primarily because they're white

I thought white was pro

that's what shasta told me to make me feel ok about them. maybe i looked like a dirt in my cut off shorts and other noncycling clothes

bingo

ya, comments in this article pretty much sum it up. if you wear white, you're claiming you're 733t

http://www.6yearsinaraincape.com/2009/12/21/i-have-always-personally-loved-the-black-shoes-on-the-bike-black-socks-too-but-as-of-late-the-euro-cool-thing-of-course-is-white-only-i-just-dont-like-it-havent-adopted-it-and-probably-w/

That site has the most retarded background colour scheme ever.

My shoes are grey, what does this say about me?

it says that you are a euro livin in America.

get some shoe covers for the winter months to prevent those white shoes from turning beige/gray.

also if you dress like a Fred prepare to get called out lol.

just be fast, the rest is commentary

mmmm spanish beef...

sent by my cousin, clemente buterol? did someone pop?

totes realize not a big deal for the weather hardmen, but for us californians this is pretty novel:
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_bkV80B63wT8/TO8HSawMRrI/AAAAAAAADQs/c9GonS6YrUc/100_6247.JPG

that's cute, shasta. here's a shot of my bike the ~day before~

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4147/5205910328_111e867a5c_z.jpg

whoa retro timestamp. what climb is that, hamilton?

13 deg F at the start of todays commute. it warmed up to 20 by the time i hit the office, but my feets feel like blocks of ice.
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